by schischa

Urxvt or rxvt-unicode is a very configurable terminal emulator. Some time ago I wrote about some fancy stuff that enables things like deamon mode, clickable links, transparent, borderless terminal window, aso.
Being inactive for some time it’s time to update the old posts. I will keep this rather short as the most important issues are already described in the older posts you can find at the end of the article under related articles.

Transparent and borderless

I prefer transparent terminals very much. If you do too here is what to do: Add the relevant parts to your .Xdefaults file so that you don’t have to specify startup parameters every time for urxvt(c). Make also sure to adjust the colors in a way that enhances readability with transparent terminals.

Here is how it looks:
irssi in urxvt
urxvt in awesome

You can see the relevant parts below or also find the complete Xdefaults file here: Xdefaults

URxvt*termName: rxvt

## borderless and no scrollbar
URxvt*scrollBar_right: false
URxvt*scrollBar: false
URxvt*borderLess: false

## teh transparency stuff
URxvt*inheritPixmap: true
URxvt*tintColor: white
URxvt*shading: 40

## geometry and font
URxvt*geometry: 84×24
URxvt*font: xft:terminus:pixelsize=12

## change default colors
URxvt*background: #000000
URxvt*foreground: #A8A8A8
URxvt*color0: #000000
URxvt*color1: #A80000
URxvt*color2: #00A800
URxvt*color3: #A85400
URxvt*color4: #0000A8
URxvt*color5: #A800A8
URxvt*color6: #00A8A8
URxvt*color7: #A8A8A8
URxvt*color8: #545054
URxvt*color9: #F85450
URxvt*color10: #50FC50
URxvt*color11: #F2FC50
URxvt*color12: #5054F8
URxvt*color13: #F854F8
URxvt*color14: #50FCF8
URxvt*color15: #F8FCF8

Deamon mode

Urxvt offers a deamon mode. It offers many advantages like decreased startup time and lesser use of ressources with lots of opened terminal windows.

Just start the urxvt-deamon with:

urxvtd -q -f -o

You may add this line to your .xinitrc so it gets started every time you start X. After that you can start the client windows with

urxvtc

Beware that using the daemon bares the risk of loosing all terminal windows if a crash occurs. But I just want to mention that never happened in the last 2 years ;-)

Clickable links

Many people don’t know it’s kind of easy to tell urxvt to make your links clickable so they are opened in the internet-browser of your choice.

URxvt.perl-ext-common: default,matcher
URxvt.urlLauncher: firefox
URxvt.matcher.button: 2
URxvt.matcher.pattern.1: \\bwww\\.[\\w-]\\.[\\w./?&@#-]*[\\w/-]

Customize the matcher button to the mouse button of your choice and the browser to the browser of your choice. The matcher pattern should work for everybody so far and detects links automatically in the terminal-window.

So far, stay tuned and feel free to comment. Greetings to the guys from #archlinux.de for motivating me ;)